An Autobiography

Do they still sing my name
under the starry sky?
Do they still find my name
etched in the stars?
Do they still hear my whispers
when the wind writes her poetry
over the desert sands?
Do they remember the irony
I invented once when the moonlight
reached the haunted barn
and disturbed the dreams
of the brooding pigeons?
Perhaps not
But I was a God once,
till the temptation of flesh
became too strong for me to resist…

And now, only the silence
can afford to sing my name
Only the great nothingness
beyond the seven seas can
fill itself with my confirmation
of existence
Only the corpses with their
lice-infested skulls and the
mummies with their petrified
flesh can remember me,
For once, I was their God
For once, my hand used to
point their path to the grave
And now, the deserted stone-corridors
of the catacombs and the pyramids
whisper my name in the naked
silence of eternity and doom

The seven frozen children
stare at me from across the mirage
with their eyes full of the last
moment of life as it left them
with their eyes full of the first
moment of death as it entered them
But my only terror is that
there is no love or hatred
in those eyes…
They were the seven children
of my seven deadly passions…
I married the seven sins, and
each bore me a child…
And after the last one was sired,
a great misty veil of silence came
down from the heavens and engulfed
me into the wombs of my very first
mother – her name was Darkness

I lost my crown of thorn, I lost my
kingdom of moonborne dreams
I became empty, empty like a
leafless maple covered with winter-frost
And as I lay chained in the bastille of my
passions, I saw my children die…

And now the owl sends her condolences
to the moon by hooting out thrice every
midnight, and for three seconds, the moon
wears the cloudy veil of a silent widow…

Clocks tick on,
Angry moths spit between the hungry
eyes of lizards
Soldiers empty their machineguns
in the empty stomachs of starving
children and fatigued saints
Eternal nothingness waits like
a seasoned stalker
in the padded paws of a cat which
she licks whenever a mouse
is spotted
Revolution squanders in empty
liquor bottles
as those red ants make a feast with
cow dung
And the world trembles between
my dusty boot-heels
with desperate pain, striving to find a voice
The new gods want me to kneel down
and repent, so that I can join their league

I refuse to hear…